Questions from the Unsettled Mind

Eve was deceived. Adam was not, and the texts say so explicitly. He was no fool either. So he ate the fruit knowing exactly what it meant and exactly what it would cost. Why?

In this episode:

• What the serpent supplied that God had withheld: a false motive, divine jealousy, for an unexplained command

• Why the stupidity answer fails, given that Adam named the animals, inferred his own lack of a mate, and composed the first verse

• What not being deceived commits us to: he knew Eve had fallen away from God and from him, and he loved her

• Loves as forms of power, and therefore of harm: loyalty over common sense, eroticism corroding trust, maternal concern hardening into tyranny

• Why mortal love must be grounded in the good of its object, and why the greatest good of the beloved is God

• Adam's failure read as a failure of charity, and the fact that by evening he was blaming God for the wife he had been given

• Perelandra, where C. S. Lewis gives the man the opposite test: if she falls, he must not follow, because his fidelity may be her only way back

Mentioned: Genesis 3:6 · C. S. Lewis, Perelandra · Judas Iscariot and St Peter

Many of these questions are collected in Questions from the Unsettled Mind and More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, both available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The American Church's strategy for renewing its numbers has essentially been sexual reproduction, and around eighty per cent of those children abandon the faith during college. You do not replace a population at a twenty per cent rate.

In this episode:

• Why the great commission and the thousands converted at Pentecost point to adults, not only to larger families

• Spiritual reproduction, the rule that children cannot bear young, and the honest state of RCIA in the average parish

• Defence against offence: the three times Ephesians 6 says stand, set against Jesus's promise that the gates of hell will not prevail

• Rome's seventy sets of catacombs, then the barbarians, then the Vikings and Normandy, as the historical pattern of conversion

• St John's three stages of growth, ending in spiritual fathers and mothers who replicate themselves into the world

• Why 1 Corinthians 13 counts as milk, written to a church too immature to handle anything richer

• Ephesians 4:11-16, and why your priest is a chef and a builder while the work of ministry belongs to the pew-sitter

Mentioned: Ephesians 4:11-16 · Ephesians 6 · 1 Corinthians 13 · 1 John · Socrates

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

In the chrysalis the caterpillar digests itself, head included, and almost nothing of it survives. Plenty of religions picture the next life that way. The people who have actually been seen on the other side suggest otherwise.

In this episode:

• What the metamorphosis really destroys: setae, legs, antennae, even the head, dissolved into chrysalis soup

• Roman cremation, Egyptian mummification, Scientology's vessel and Altered Carbon's sleeves as rival verdicts on the body

• Why the more a religion emphasises total replacement, the less importance it places on living a fully human life now

• The Transfiguration: Moses and Elijah recognisably themselves, both with bodies, though one of them had been buried

• The risen Jesus eating food, knowing his friends by name, remembering how fishing works, and cooking breakfast

• The angels at the Ascension, the Assumption of Mary, and why a promise of rooms rules out ghosts, pure consciousnesses and angels

• Romans 8 on this world as womb and labour, and the Church's hospitals, charities and universities as the practical consequence

Mentioned: Romans 8 · the Transfiguration · St Augustine's two cities · Altered Carbon

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The ancient Greeks said lovers are two halves of one whole. But if any two halves fit, why are some marriages so much harder than others, and what does that tell us about God as a potential spouse?

In this episode:

• The bisected circle, and why it wrongly implies any man and any woman are equally good matches

• Putting teeth on the dividing line: compatibility of traits and talents, and why not all teeth fit together

• Why chemistry and communication are poor predictors, and the far longer list of factors Jane Austen's novels weigh

• The audio-waveform dividing line as a picture of fifty years of merged marriage, and the hazy line as a picture of young love's potential

• Why marriage is a human institution and not a purely spiritual one, since we are both constituted and constituting

• How God's infinity dissolves the jealousy problem: what he gives to you takes nothing from what he gives to me

• The parable of the lost sheep against the worry that we are too puny to matter, and why no two people's love of God is alike

Mentioned: Jane Austen · the Beatific Vision · the parable of the lost sheep

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Vampire stories keep saying that becoming one costs you your soul. Taken seriously, that claim is either about damnation or about becoming a different species, and neither explains why Bella's transformation looks so much like the resurrection of the dead.

In this episode:

• The two senses of losing your soul: the ethical one, irrevocable mortal sin, and the metaphysical one, being replaced by another kind of creature

• Why being bitten cannot damn anyone, and Jesus's rule that nothing entering a man makes him unclean, only what comes out of him

• Edward's confession that he hunted only serial killers, with Dexter as the parallel, and whether that is a justification or a rationalisation

• The actual trade: no children, no food or sleep, no sunlight, every mortal friend outlived, and no ordinary access to the Eucharist

• Why the blood lust reads as a dark inversion of the sacramental order of Christ's body and blood

• The recurring lesson of superhero, cyborg and engineered-soldier stories: happiness is species-specific, so transcending your nature makes you miserable

• Bella's transformation as both the beginning and the end of human nature, Eden on one side and incorruptibility on the other

Mentioned: The Twilight Saga · Breaking Dawn · Dexter

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Egyptian records say nothing about a mass slave escape. Silence proves nothing either way, so is there any positive reason to treat the Exodus as history rather than Israelite myth?

In this episode:

• Why ancient peoples recorded victories and spun their defeats, shown by the rival accounts of the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC

• Why an absence at Karnak is not an argument, and why positive evidence is needed instead

• The Ark of the Covenant set beside the Egyptian barque: a portable shrine with rings and carrying poles

• The telling differences - a box rather than a boat, and a blank space where a golden image of the god would sit

• Egyptian temples built along an axis into the Holy of Holies, and the same graded architecture in the tabernacle and temple

• Amun, the hidden one, and holiness marked by who is progressively excluded from each space

• Israel's entire tradition built on the deliverance, and Passover kept in travelling clothes with walking sticks in hand

• Troy as the precedent for origin myths with real locations turning out to have real beginnings

Mentioned: the Battle of Kadesh · Karnak · the Ark of the Covenant · Amun · Passover · Troy

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Kant said an act is only pure when you get nothing from it and do not even want to do it. On that view the person who enjoys being good is the worse of the two. He is not right, and the reason why matters.

In this episode:

• Kant's shopkeeper who charges everyone the same price, tightened through three escalating versions

• Where the argument lands: only duty set against inclination counts as moral worth

• The egoism and altruism dichotomy, and the Christian thinkers who took it over for the doctrine of charity

• Why Kant's ethics is Gnostic reductionism, shrinking the whole human good down to the good of the will

• Plato's Republic on confusing happiness with pleasure, and Hedonism as the opposite reduction

• Love your neighbour as yourself, taken as evidence that self-love is a primary good

• Storge, eros, philia and agape, and why Jesus named philia rather than agape the highest love

• The rolled minivan on the way to the beach: agape at the roadside, philia twenty years later

Mentioned: Immanuel Kant · Plato's Republic · storge, eros, philia, agape · the Good Samaritan · Mother Teresa · the Stoics

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Everyone calls this the hardest question there is. It may be the easiest. Look at what dying people actually write on the scraps of paper found with their bodies.

In this episode:

• The deathbed test, and what trapped cavers and submariners left behind them

• The two greatest commandments, and the fact that both turn on the same verb

• Why love is a verb: done rather than experienced, chosen rather than fallen into

• Genesis 1 and human nature as a plurality of persons, mirroring the divine nature it images

• The family as the bedrock schooling in love - parents, then siblings, then spouse, then children

• The daily choice, put three times over: selfishness or self-giving love

• The heroin addict as the test case for pleasure mistaken for happiness, and emptiness even while high

• Love as the greatest theological virtue, a habit of constant choice infused at baptism as a seed

Mentioned: the two greatest commandments · Genesis 1 · the theological virtues

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Religion does not exempt you from grief and nothing speeds it up. What it can do is keep you from mistaking depression for despair, which is the one thing that will finish you.

In this episode:

• The assumption that faith should let you shortcut agony, misery and decay, and why it does not

• C. S. Lewis, and the claim that grief is moved through by the body far more than by the spirit

• Sleep, animals and fencing: forms of respite that force attention outside the habits of loss

• First principle - your grief is caused by your love, and is proportioned to it

• Second principle - you never get over a loss, because the loss is now part of who you are, which is why people say through and not over

• The distinction that matters: everyone grieving is depressed, but despair robs you of the possibility of future love

• Third principle - healing by growing around the loss rather than denying it or burying yourself in work

• The warning against dating after losing a spouse, and romance as a drug used to closet grief

Mentioned: C. S. Lewis

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Modern historical method tends to discount tradition, which is a strange move, because every ancient culture stored its history in practices rather than in books. So did God.

In this episode:

• Why ignoring tradition is itself anachronistic, imposing contemporary categories onto the past

• Mimetic tradition as God's chosen method of transmission long before a word of Scripture was written

• Passover and the Mass as ritual re-enactments that carry a people's history forward

• Holy Orders and the laying on of hands as an institution handed down person to person from Pentecost

• Why the claim that the Church wrote the Bible astonishes Protestants, and what it does and does not assert

• Why the Church worships the living Word rather than a book

• Ambiguity, nuance and symbolism: why meaning does not sit in the words alone, and how Jesus read the Jewish texts

Mentioned: Passover · Holy Orders · Pentecost

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.